Street of Thieves

My street was one of the worst in the neighborhood, or one of the most picturesque if you like, it answered to the flowery name of Carrer Robadors, Street of Thieves, a headache for the district’s town hall — street of whores, of drug addicts, drunkards, of dropouts of all kinds who spent their days in this narrow citadel that smelled of urine, stale beer, tagine, and samosas. It was our palace, our fortress; you entered through the little bottleneck on Carrer de Hospital, and you emerged on the esplanade of modern buildings at the corner of Carrer de Sant Rafael, which opened onto the Rambla del Raval; opposite, on the other side of Carrer Sant Pau, began Carrer de Sant Ramon, another fortress — between the two, the new movie theater, supposed to transform the neighborhood by the lights of culture and draw the bourgeois from the North, the well-to-do from Eixample who, without the geographical-cultural initiatives of the City, would never come down here. Of course the lovers of auteur films and the clients of the four-star hotel on the Rambla del Raval had to be protected not only from the excesses of the rabble, but also from the temptation of going to the whores or buying drugs, and so the zone was patrolled 24/7 by the cops, who often parked their van at the end of our Palace of Thieves: their presence, far from being reassuring, on the contrary gave the impression that this region was under surveillance, that there was real danger, especially when the patrol was large, armed to the teeth, and in bulletproof vests.

By day, whoring was present, but somewhat limited; by night in the high season, dead-drunk foreign tourists got lost in our alleys and sometimes let themselves be tempted by a pretty black chick they’d take from behind, in a doorway, out in the open: I often saw, late at night, the moving shimmer of white buttocks breaking through the penumbra of corner spaces.

Our building was at the start of the Street of Thieves, at its narrowest part, close to Hospital Street; it was a typical neighborhood building, old, ruined; one of those that, despite the efforts of the owners and the city hall, seemed to resist any renovation: the steps in the stairway had lost half their tiles, the woodwork was warped, the walls were ridding themselves of their coating in large sections whose debris littered the landings; electric wires hung from the ceiling, the old ceramic sockets hadn’t seen the nose of a light bulb for ages, and the rusty, dented mailboxes gaped apart, disjointed or wide open, when they still had a door. The stairway was peopled with cockroaches and rats and it wasn’t rare, climbing upstairs at night, to surprise a fat black rodent sucking at the needle of an abandoned syringe, to extract the little drop of blood — the creature would skitter away through a hole in the wall of an apartment, and you’d always shiver, thinking the same thing could happen on our floor.